In the supervisory control of industrial plants there is a requirement for accessing configuration information, set point information and so on for the all of the various equipment and processes controlled by a control system in an industrial installation. This information is typically accessed by authorised persons, engineers or other users, using features provided by the control system. Typically control systems comprise one or more distributed control systems (DCS) and/or supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. With the increases in computing power and advances in communication and computerized measurement there is an increasing amount of data and other information available for the engineers and the other users.
The information is today often presented to the operators through a display screen showing process data (measurements, values), tag identifiers, equipment ID, alarm status, connections between plant equipment, etc. As more and more data is present in the control system, the visual user interfaces often hold very much information.
WO01/02953 describes a method for integration of many and various types of applications in a computerized system. This method is based on a concept where real world objects are represented as composite. Different facets of a real world object, such as its physical location, the current stage in a process, a control function, an operator interaction etc., are described as different aspects of the composite object. In this application, composite objects as defined by WO01/02953 are referred to as aspect objects.
A feature of the method described in WO01/02953 is that aspect objects can be organized in structures. A structure of aspect objects is a hierarchy of object instances. It may be based on any type of relations between aspect object instances. An aspect object can be placed in several structures at the same time, where the different structures represent different relations, e.g. functional and physical containment (functional structure and location structure). A further application of this approach to control system architecture is described in US-2002-0046290-A1. A meta object representing an entity is typically represented in several hierarchical structures at the same time within a control system. For example, a certain piece of process equipment has a certain position in a functional structure depending on the functional breakdown of the plant. It has also a physical position, and thus it has a place in a location structure. The same piece of equipment may currently be allocated to a certain production order, so it belongs to an order structure. Because it is used to produce a certain product, it also fits in a product structure.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,002,398 entitled Navigation between property pages with tabs and menus, assigned to Novell, Inc., a method is described for displaying a tabbed dialog box, a property sheet, which has at least one child window. The parent window or property sheet has a multiple associated, displayable child windows. However at run time the described program loads all of the objects, including graphics, for all the child windows after user initiates the action which represents a heavy load on processor, display and system resources at runtime.
A software object in a control system is often represented in several structures and/or locations or functional or logical groupings in a control system. In the engineering phase, or during a maintenance or troubleshooting operation, the engineer is often in a situation where she needs information about the inclusion of a given object in several of the structures. Such plant control systems often use a software that generates a graphic representation of objects such as Plant Explorer, which gives a view of data structures much like the views provided by Microsofts Windows Explorer. In current systems, the engineer must manually navigate back and forth between the structures in the control system to find the other locations of the same object, or open several plant explorer windows and use one of these windows for each structural location.